We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

The BBC’s Chief International Correspondent thinks there are lots of Jews in Syria

Danny Cohen was once the Director of BBC Television. When he writes in the Telegraph about the way that the BBC currently reports on Jewish and Israeli issues, one can sense the anger of someone who has been let down by former colleagues. In his latest article he writes,

This week the BBC has been reporting live from Syria as the wretched Assad regime collapsed. It is not clear yet whether Syria is destined for a democratic future or will fall prey to jihadists previously affiliated with the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.

It seems though that the BBC is optimistic. Reporting live from Damascus, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet said the following: ‘‘This is one of the most diverse countries in the Middle East with multiple Christian and Muslim sects. And you can see it here in the Old City, all the different Quarters – Jewish, Muslim, Christian. They’re all here. They want to believe they have a space now as Syria embarks on this new chapter.”

For anyone with the slightest knowledge of the 20th century history of Jewish people in the Arab world, this statement is both ignorant and offensive.

There are believed to be three Jews left in Syria. That’s right, three Jews. The rest fled for their lives. After Syria gained independence from France in 1946, Jewish people and their property were repeatedly targeted. In 1947, the Syrian government organised and encouraged Arab inhabitants of Aleppo to attack Jews. Pogroms followed. Synagogues, Jewish schools and orphanages were destroyed. From that point on it was clear that Jews were not welcome in Syria. The community fled to Israel and elsewhere and now there are just those three Jews left in the whole country.

Related post: Examples of spectacular historical ignorance. I will take the liberty of quoting one of my own comments to that post:

…the holes in the knowledge of innocent dupes are frequently – in fact almost always – the evidence that someone in the past succeeded in deliberately fostering a myth, or blanking out a truth.

Has Javier Milei really made a horrible mistake?

“Argentina’s Javier Milei has made a horrible mistake”, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph. The article can also be read here.

A year after his landslide victory, Milei is still not letting market forces set the peso exchange rate, and it now looks as if his crawling dollar peg will continue into the middle of next year. He has jammed the process of macroeconomic cleansing.

Argentina is now among the most expensive countries in the world, close to Norway on the Big Mac index. It costs almost twice as much to buy a hamburger in Buenos Aires as it does in Tokyo, even though the pampas are full of cattle, while the rice terraces of Japan are not.

The peso is as overvalued today as it has ever been in Argentine history, or very close. This has suppressed inflation temporarily to a monthly rate of 2.4pc – so has economic contraction – but has in the process strangled the traded sectors of the textile, shoe and toy industries. Car parts, electronics, metallurgy, and heavy manufacturing are the next dominoes.

[…]

He should have taken his chainsaw to currency and capital controls on his first day in office. He is now trapped. Either he claws back lost competitiveness by means of deflationary wage cuts for year after year – nigh impossible in any democracy – or he lets the peso find its level and unleashes a fresh inflation, shattering his reputation at home and abroad as the Friedmanite purist who tamed prices.

A commenter called Krassi Stoyanova says, “Well, Ambrose, having listened to Milei and his plans for the Argentine economy, I have far more confidence in him than I do you.”

I want to agree. But, truth to tell, I do not have a good understanding of this branch of economics. Some of you guys do. What do you think?

Samizdata quote of the day – Musk & Milei’s cult of disruption

“But there is a limit to how much we can gain from a combination of long-term reforms and controlled disruption. The deeper problem with the public sector is not the people who run it but the people who use it. The combination of an ageing population and a stagnant economy means that a growing number of countries can no longer afford the largesse of the post-war era. And the only viable long-term solution to this problem (barring a productivity miracle) is to cut big entitlements rather than to pretend that we can force the public sector to produce miracles. What really needs to be disrupted is not so much the workings of government as the public’s expectations.”

Adrian Wooldridge.

Samizdata quote of the day – the Canary Wharf Black: from Biafra to Deloitte

The BLM lobby is still dominated by Afro-Caribbeans. More Africans have sympathies with the Conservative Party than Afro-Caribbeans (even if they don’t necessarily vote for them) — just look at Kemi Badenoch. Now, like most Pimlico Journal readers, I have no time at all for her. However, she does have the potential to help obliterate any future prospect of reparations. All she would need to do is ask that Nigeria, Benin, Ghana, Somalia, and Saudi Arabia foot half the bill for reparations, and black solidarity would immediately dissipate. Very suddenly, the Fulani will see themselves as tanned Tuaregs; the Somali as Cushitic; and Leroy from Montego Bay will forgo his chicken shop Shahada because Moroccan poon tang just isn’t worth that sort of money. Once you distract them from the easy punching bag that is the white man, they can start fighting each other; meritocracy sorts the rest out.

Pimlico Journal

The annulment of Romania’s election is indeed a wake-up call for democracies

Just not in the way the Guardian thinks.

The Guardian view on Romania’s annulled election: a wake-up call for democracies

The unprecedented move by the country’s constitutional court last week to annul the results of the first round of the presidential election, amid allegations of Russian interference, is a landmark moment in the increasingly embattled arena of eastern European politics. The decision followed an astonishing surge to first place by a far-right admirer of Vladimir Putin, who had been polling in low single digits until the eve of the election. According to declassified intelligence reports, Călin Georgescu benefited from a vote that was manipulated by various illicit means, including cyber-attacks and a Russian-funded TikTok campaign. Analysts found that about 25,000 pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts became active only two weeks before the first-round vote.

What form did the “manipulation of the vote” by these cyber-attacks take? One would think the Guardian’s leader-writer would be clearer on this point. If it was something like changing the tallies on voting machines (I do not know if Romania even has voting machines), that absolutely would be illicit manipulation of the vote. No doubt Vladimir Putin would be delighted to literally falsify the numbers of votes cast for candidates in the Romanian election if he could, but did he? Give us evidence, or I am going to assume that these alleged cyber-attacks are of a piece with the 25,000 fake TikTok accounts – that is, not attacks at all, just the issuance of propaganda. As I have frequently said, Vladimir Putin belongs at the end of a rope. But that is because he is a mass-murderer, not because he gets a bunch of drudges and bots to say words on the internet.

When I was a kid, I used to turn the dial of our family’s radio to “Moscow” quite often. Radio Moscow wasn’t as good – by which I mean it wasn’t as bad – as Radio Tirana, whose announcer would say “Good night, dear listeners” in a strange voice eerily reminiscent of the evil Dr Crow in Carry On Spying, who I have just found out after half a century was not played by Hattie Jacques but by Judith Furse, only voiced by John Bluthal in order to sound more asexual. (The character is meant to be the forerunner of a race of artificially created superior beings who have gone beyond being male or female.) Neither the supervillainesque lady in Albania or the main Russian presenter, whose English accent was eerily good, had much luck in turning me communist. But I always thought that one of the things that made the UK a democracy was that I was perfectly free to turn the dial to Tirana or Moscow and let them try.

Political & military earthquake in Syria

The brutal Assad regime has collapsed. That is one on the eye for Russia, always a good thing, seeing the end of the Russian navy’s only base in the Mediterranean. And one in the eye for Iran, also a good thing, meaning they have little to no ability to continue supporting what is left of Hezbollah… but the motley crew who have toppled the Ba’athist Syrian regime have more than a few black ISIS/Al-Qaeda flags in their midst, so regardless of very conciliatory statements by HTS towards Syria’s non-Islamic population and even Israel, it remains to be seen how this will shake out.

As a side note: when Patricia Marins predicted the rebel offensive would go nowhere, I became confident the rebels were headed for victory a week ago 😀

You are forbidden to listen to foreigners!

I saw this comment by Paul Marks to the previous post and thought, “This is huge. Why isn’t this story the main headline on every news outlet?”

It is being reported, somewhat less prominently than the Princess of Wales going to a carol concert. Heartwarming though that is, I would have thought that the fact that a Romanian court has annulled the first round of their presidential election because the Russians allegedly “ran a coordinated online campaign to promote the far-right outsider who won the first round” was bigger news.

So what if they did? Where did this idea come from that the people of a country are not allowed to watch, read or listen to foreigners attempting to persuade them how to vote? Well, certain foreigners at least – those who promote this information Juche never seem to have a problem with the European Union’s taxpayer-funded propagation of its opinion.

“The EU proposal to scan all your WhatsApp chats is back on the agenda”

And not just “on the agenda” in general, on today’s agenda at the European Council, “where national ministers from each EU country meet to negotiate and adopt EU laws”.

They never give up, and with “they” being the European Union, they only have to win once.

Tech Radar reports,

The EU proposal to scan all your private communications to halt the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is back on regulators’ agenda – again.

What’s been deemed by critics as Chat Control has seen many twists and turns since the European Commission presented the first version of the draft bill in May 2022. The latest development came in October 2024, when a last-minute decision by the Netherlands to abstain from the vote prompted the Hungarian Council Presidency to remove the matter from the planned discussion.

Now, about two months later, the controversial proposal has returned and is amongst the topics the EU Council is set to discuss today, December 4, 2024. EU members are also expected to express their vote on Friday, December 6.

That’s today, kids.

As mentioned, lawmakers have implemented some changes to the EU CSAM bill amid growing criticism from the privacy, tech, and political benches.

Initially, the plan was to require messaging services and email providers to scan all your messages on the lookout for illegal material – no matter if these were encrypted, like WhatsApp or Signal chats, for example, to ensure that communications remain private between the sender and receiver.

Lawmakers suggested employing what’s known as client side-scanning, a technique that experts, including some of the best VPN providers and messaging apps, have long warned against as it cannot be executed without breaking encryption protection. Even the UK halted this requirement under its Online Safety Act until “it’s technically feasible to do so.”

Fast-forward to June 2024, the second version of the EU proposal aims to target shared photos, videos, and URLs instead of text and audio messages upon users’ permission. There’s a caveat, though – you must consent to the shared material being scanned before being encrypted to keep using the functionality.

Samzidata quote of the day – get woke, go broke

Whether Jaguar’s new electric car flops as a result of all this remains to be seen. It would hardly be surprising if Jaguar’s traditional audience – the people who actually buy its cars – give up on the company in response to all this insufferable virtue-signalling. After bending the knee so readily to the trans cause, that would be the least Jaguar deserves.

Malcolm Clark

An analysis idea for ChatGPT: policy ideas derived from Samizdata.net

Greg Eiden has an interesting idea we thought might be interesting/terrifying/amusing…

What might ChatGPT or other such tools derive from an analysis of the Samizdata blog post archives? To focus this on something timely: ask it to do the analysis and propose policy ideas for the new Trump Administration, ideas consistent with the perspectives and ideas of the Samizdatista community. Or at least the broad consensus of that community about liberty and limited, less regulatory government.

There are other ways this might be posed to an AI, e.g., “which proposed policies of the Trump administration are consistent with the broad governance perspectives at Samizdata.net and why? Which are not and why?” How would you set up such an analysis to have the model have the best chance at producing something useful?

I am not interested in an experiment that assesses if ChatGPT is a good model for this or a good model in general–I want a good analysis! If the product of such an inquiry was not compelling to enough samizdatistas, if it did not pass a laugh test, we stop there.

Maybe there is a better choice of large language model than ChatGPT; maybe ChatGPT is not optimized for this sort of analysis but other models are? If you have some knowledge here, please chime in!

We had to overturn our liberal democratic order in order to save it from being overturned

I did not see this coming: “South Korea’s president declares emergency martial law”, reports the BBC.

Yoon Suk Yeol, the South Korean president, is quoted as saying, “Our National Assembly has become a haven for criminals, a den of legislative dictatorship that seeks to paralyse the judicial and administrative systems and overturn our liberal democratic order.”

Sounds like projection to me.

Can anyone explain what is going on? Is there really any more of a threat from North Korea than there always is, or is it all to do with domestic politics?

Update: Lawmakers in South Korea vote to lift the martial law decree. The Guardian link says,

South Korea’s parliament, with 190 of its 300 members present, just passed a motion requiring the martial law declared by President Yoon Suk Yeol to be lifted.

All 190 lawmakers present voted to lift the measure, according to CNN.

Much depends on which 190 lawmakers were present. If the very fact that they were still in the parliament building after martial law was declared was because they they were from the opposition, President Yoon will dismiss it – although the 190 being an absolute majority of South Korea’s MPs does give their vote moral weight.

If it was a broad spread of MPs from several parties, this vote might mean the end of the coup. Either way, it is troubling to realise that a country that everyone thought was a stable democracy isn’t.

Did democracy stop being cool or something?

This resonated with me, in a slightly painful way

As a good libertarian, I feel I ought to like the emphasis that the Montessori method of education places on giving children maximum freedom. On the other hand, what I said on Tuesday, October 17, 2006 was – what is that word they used to use? – that’s it, right.

It’s been called discovery learning, experiential learning, problem-based learning, inquiry learning and now (heaven help us) “constructivist instructional techniques”.

Whatever you call it, it gives worse results for most people most of the time than just telling them.

It would save you time to take my word for it, but, if you are so inclined, you can click on the link to my old blog to discover my reasons #1, #2, #3a, #3b and #0 for saying that teachers consistently overestimate the effectiveness of discovery learning. The individual links no longer work; you’ll have to scroll down. The process will be good for your soul.

So why am I sitting here wincing as I think about the Montessori method for the first time in decades?

Because of these three tweets that form part of a long thread by Samantha Joy, an advocate of the Montessori system. She writes,

How should we help young children develop positive social skills? The typical answer:

>put children in groups
>enforce norms like sharing
>encourage collaborative play

But this approach *backfires*… often tragically. Montessori saw this, and developed a new approach:

Most people think the focus for ages 0-6 should be socializing.

Learning can wait, they say.

This is the time to meet other children and do things together: play outside, pretend, build things.

There’s just one problem with this strategy …

young children, by and large, aren’t all that interested in one another.

They *prefer* to work and play alone.

True? Or just true for the sort of anti-social little freaks who were destined to still own the set of felt tip pens* they got at the age of ten half a century later?

*Most of which still write. That’s because I put the lids on properly.